


Blaine Anderson and boxing: a response to abuse

by CyanoFal



Category: Glee
Genre: Archived from cyanoticfallacy blog, Gen, Implied/Referenced Child Abuse, Meta, Meta Essay, Nonfiction
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2018-12-09
Updated: 2018-12-09
Packaged: 2019-09-14 16:44:08
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 648
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/16916541
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/CyanoFal/pseuds/CyanoFal
Summary: "After getting bullied so much I took up boxing." A meta post reflecting on Blaine's internalization of pain. - Originally posted on May 27, 2018 on cyanoticfallacy blog





	Blaine Anderson and boxing: a response to abuse

"After getting bullied so much I took up boxing." 

~

The Blaine thoughts I had when I saw this the first time that came up again after this flash rewatch:

Blaine’s response to being bullied so much was to take up a violent sport to learn how to defend himself (maybe the seeds were there that he wanted to hurt others like he hurt too? But textual Blaine is so much more defensive than offensive that it seems unlikely). And specifically, he does this in secret, with the Dalton underground fight club, “which obviously I’m not supposed to talk about!” What is interesting to me is that this is an action he did in secret.

Blaine tried to go to authority figures when he got bashed at Sadie Hawkins, like his teachers and principal, but in his words, no one cared. He doesn’t mention his parents’ response to this, and I’m inclined to believe that they cared that this happened, but they weren’t good at expressing it. Blaine says no one cared, which means he felt alone in the situation, so if they did give him support, it wasn’t good enough for him to feel it. This aligns with what we know of his family. His dad tried to get him to help him fix a car in what Blaine perceived as him trying to straighten Blaine out. There is a reason Blaine felt that way, so even if it wasn’t his dad’s primary goal, Blaine had a relationship with his dad where he knew his dad disapproved of him. Blaine’s mom is mostly in the wedding episode drunk, but from a behind the scenes photo of the guest book, she signed the book saying she loved Blaine and knew he’d never leave her like his father did. There’s a sense of dependency there, and this dynamic is reminiscent of Quinn’s parents in season 1, where her dad was a domineering figure and her mom was a functional alcoholic. The only moment we hear about Blaine’s parents in a kind way is after the school shooting, where they stayed up all night talking with him. We see Blaine’s parents care about his well-being, but that caring isn’t often particularly warm.

And then we have Blaine’s relationship with his brother, Cooper Anderson, given the deep-dive in Big Brother. The whole episode is about Blaine being sick of Cooper constantly criticizing him and never listening to him. We see a flashback to them as children and Cooper’s doing this same thing to a (likely) four-year-old baby Blaine. Kid’s learn things from their parents, so it makes sense that Cooper learned this criticism from the older Andersons and mirrored it to Blaine as the expectation of what talking to kids is like. From his parents to his older brother, it’s not like an abusive environment that you’d find on Degrassi, but it’s a highly critical environment that a developing, sensitive, and emotional child would internalize.

And the way Blaine internalized it is that he can’t talk to anyone about his feelings or else everyone will turn it around to criticize him. He can’t ask anyone for help for the physical or emotional pain, so it’s up to him to figure out how to fix things himself. He can’t talk about being scared after Sadie Hawkins and feeling lonely after transferring schools, so he takes up boxing. And to let anyone know that he’s boxing would be to reveal that he’s scared, so he does it in secret, with this underground group. The boxing comes up after Sam shoves him in the choir room, a physical altercation where he’s an outsider, and after he fights with his brother, a reminder of familiar criticism and thus emotional invalidation. Blaine took up boxing because he was scared, and he took it up in secret because he knew nobody would listen to him when he spoke.

**Author's Note:**

> Original post accompanied by a reblog of this image:
> 
> http://devonlucyarchive.tumblr.com/post/57265250127/after-getting-bullied-so-much-i-took-up-boxing


End file.
